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Science
Nasal Spray Holds Hope in Fighting Flu Epidemic
A new method, still being tested, would coat receptors in the throat and nose before influenza viruses attach.
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Books
Taken for a Ride
Lance Armstrong and the win-at-all-costs world of pro cycling.How Do You Say “Nobody Could Have Predicted” In Swedish?
A correspondent points me to the news from Sweden, which has stopped flirting with deflation and moved right in. Here’s inflation excluding food, energy, tobacco, and alcohol:
Eurostat
It’s amazing: Sweden, which at first
weathered the crisis fairly well, and faced none of the institutional
constraints of the euro area, has managed — completely gratuitously — to
get itself into a deflationary trap.
The Riksbank says, in effect, that nobody
could have predicted this development. But of course its own former
deputy governor — and my former colleague — Lars Svensson, more or less frantically warned
that the Riksbank was making a terrible mistake by tightening money
despite low inflation and lots of economic slack. His reward was
increasing isolation, and eventually departure. You see, all the VSSPs —
very serious Swedish people — knew that it was important to raise
interest rates because, well, because.
And getting out of the trap is going to be very hard.
I’d like to imagine that people will admit
that Lars was right all along, and that in general the urge to purge has
been highly destructive. But my guess is that he’ll still be considered
unsound — he was prematurely anti-deflationist — and that tight-money
advocates will continue to be regarded as reliable, prudent people even
as they lead us into long-run stagnation."
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Opinion
Preventing Painkiller Overdoses
With thousands of fatal overdoses from pills and heroin, the federal and state governments are trying new initiatives to save more lives.
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Real Estate
New York Boomers on Hipster Turf
Driven by a taste for adventure and a lively urban lifestyle, an older set is moving into neighborhoods colonized by the young and the artistic.
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Opinion
The Apple Chronicles
These days, the tech industry is battling over patents instead of new products.
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U.S.
Lobby for Small Brewers, Concerned Over Rule, Finds Friends in Washington
Many members of Congress have rallied to the cause of their home-state beer makers.
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U.S.
Texas Twins Campaign, but They Aren’t Sure for What
While Mayor Julián Castro of San Antonio and Representative Joaquin Castro have projected a fresh Latino face for the Democratic Party, some are concerned they are too politically cautious.On the Liberal Bias of Facts
“The facts
have a well-known liberal bias,” declared Rob Corddry way back in 2004 —
and experience keeps vindicating his joke. But why?
Not long ago Ezra Klein
cited research showing that both liberals and conservatives are subject
to strong tribal bias — presented with evidence, they see what they
want to see. I then wrote that this poses a puzzle,
because in practice liberals don’t engage in the kind of mass
rejections of evidence that conservatives do. The inevitable response
was a torrent of angry responses and claims that liberals do too reject
facts — but none of the claims measured up.
Just to be clear: Yes, you can find examples
where *some* liberals got off on a hobbyhorse of one kind or another, or
where the liberal conventional wisdom turned out wrong. But you don’t
see the kind of lockstep rejection of evidence that we see over and over
again on the right. Where is the liberal equivalent of the near-uniform
conservative rejection of climate science, or the refusal to admit that
Obamacare is in fact reaching a lot of previously uninsured Americans?
What I tried to suggest, but maybe didn’t say
clearly, is that the most likely answer lies not so much in the
character of individual liberals versus that of individual
conservatives, as in the difference between the two sides’ goals and
institutions. And Jonathan Chait’s recent thoughts on the inherently partisan nature of “data-based” journalism are, I think, helpful in bringing this better into focus.
As Chait says, the big Obamacare comeback and the reaction of the right are a very good illustration of the forces at work.
The basic facts here are that after a very
slow start due to the healthcare.gov debacle, almost everything has gone
right for reform. A huge surge of enrollments more than made up the
initially lost ground; the age mix of enrollees has improved; multiple
independent surveys have found a substantial drop in the number of
Americans without health insurance.
Opponents of Obamacare could respond to these
facts by arguing that the whole thing is nonetheless a bad idea, or
they could accept that the rollout has gone OK but call for major
changes in the program looking forward. What they’re actually engaged
in, however, is mass denial and conspiracy theorizing strongly
reminiscent of their reaction to polls showing Mitt Romney on the way to
defeat, or for that matter evidence of climate change. Acceptance of
the facts is, well, unacceptable.
Nothing illustrated this better than the reaction to Ezra Klein’s own note
about the resignation of Kathleen Sebelius, which was intended as
analysis rather than advocacy; Klein simply made the fairly obvious
point that the HHS secretary was in effect free to resign now because
Obamacare has been turned around and is going well. But Klein’s
statement was met with a mix of outrage and ridicule on the right; how
dare he suggest that the program was succeeding?
Why is it, then, that the right treats statements of fact as proof of liberal bias?
Chait’s answer, which I agree is part of the
story, is that the liberal and conservative movements are not at all
symmetric in their goals. Conservatives want smaller government as an
end in itself; liberals don’t seek bigger government per se — they want
government to achieve certain things, which is quite different. You’ll
never see liberals boasting about raising the share of government
spending in GDP the way conservatives talk proudly about bringing that
share down. Because liberals want government to accomplish something,
they want to know whether government programs are actually working;
because conservatives don’t want the government doing anything except
defense and law enforcement, they aren’t really interested in evidence
about success or failure. True, they may seize on alleged evidence of
failure to reinforce their case, but it’s about political strategy, not
genuine interest in the facts.
One side consequence of this great divide, by
the way, is the way conservatives project their own style onto their
opponents — insisting that climate researchers are just trying to
rationalize government intervention, that liberals like trains because
they destroy individualism.
But this can’t be the whole story. It doesn’t
explain, for example, the rejection of polls in 2012, or the refusal of
the right to admit that things weren’t going well in Iraq — both cases
in which conservatives really did have an interest in the outcomes. So
what else differentiates the two sides?
Well, surely another factor is the lack of a
comprehensive liberal media environment comparable to the closed
conservative universe. If you lean right, you can swaddle yourself 24/7
in Fox News and talk radio, never hearing anything that disturbs your
preconceptions. (If you were getting your “news” from Fox, you were told
that the hugely encouraging Rand survey was nothing but bad news for
Obamacare.) If you lean left, you might watch MSNBC, but the allegedly
liberal network at least tries to make a distinction between news and
opinion — and if you watch in the morning, what you get is right-wing conspiracy theorizing more or less indistinguishable from Fox.
Yet another factor may be the different
incentives of opinion leaders, which in turn go back to the huge
difference in resources. Strange to say, there are more conservative
than liberal billionaires, and it shows in think-tank funding. As a
result, I like to say that there are three kinds of economists: Liberal
professional economists, conservative professional economists, and
professional conservative economists. The other box isn’t entirely
empty, but there just isn’t enough money on the left to close the hack gap.
Finally, I do believe that there is a
difference in temperament between the sides. I know that it doesn’t show
up in the experiments done so far, which show liberals and
conservatives more or less equally inclined to misread facts in a tribal
way. But such experiments may not be enough like real life to capture
the true differences — although I’d be the first to admit that I don’t
have solid evidence for that claim. I am, after all, a liberal."
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U.S.
Bloomberg Plans a $50 Million Challenge to the N.R.A.
Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, said that gun control advocates had to learn from the National Rifle Association and punish those politicians who fail to support their agenda.Fear is not a tool I am comfortable with using.
Action is required.
Bloomberg is welcome to take action.
Vision of Home
It’s a new life for many repatriated antiquities, back on display in their countries of origin.
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U.S.
Big G.O.P. Donors Stir Senate Runs
Democrats in races that will help determine control of the Senate are burning through campaign cash as they fend off attacks from conservative groups.
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Opinion
Reining In Predatory Schools
The Obama administration should strengthen its new rules against for-profit colleges that saddle poor students with crippling debts.
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Opinion
Echoes of the Superpredator
Many states continue to punish juveniles as harshly as they can despite evidence that doing so actually increases recidivism.
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Opinion
Big Bang to Little Swoosh
The discovery of gravitational waves in the fabric of space may go down as one of the greatest in the history of science.
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U.S.
Florida Lawmakers Proposing a Salve for Ailing Springs
An effort to clean up waterways plagued by agricultural runoff and other pollutants is meeting some legislative opposition.
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Science
Paying Farmers to Welcome Birds
Conservationists and bird watchers are tracking migratory shorebirds and restoring habitat by paying rice farms in the birds’ path to keep their fields flooded with irrigation water.
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Opinion
An Indecent Burial
A recent campaign finance ruling by the Supreme Court shows the extent to which the free speech claim has become an engine of deregulation.
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Business Day
Saab in Talks to Buy ThyssenKrupp Shipyard Operations
The Swedish military contractor Saab has signed a nonbinding memorandum of understanding on the possible acquisition of ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems.
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U.S.
The Sixth Stage of Grief: Buying a Puppy
My adorable son has grown tall, lean and hairy. This explains, in part, the decision to add something unambiguously cute to our life. But Phoebe distracts us from more than just that.
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Science
Plants That Practice Genetic Engineering
Long ago, a new paper suggests, a fern took a useful gene from a neighboring hornwort, an acquisition that allowed ferns to thrive in shade.
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Opinion
Preventing Painkiller Overdoses
With thousands of fatal overdoses from pills and heroin, the federal and state governments are trying new initiatives to save more lives.
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Automobiles
Wheelies: The Welcome Back Maybach Edition
Daimler has plans to bring back the Maybach brand; AT&T strikes a connected-car deal with a global automaker.
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